Disagreement practices in ELF academic group discussion: verbal, nonverbal and interactional strategies

Abstract

Academic group work can involve challenging pragmatic acts, and chief among these is, arguably, disagreement. There is little known, however, about how disagreement is realised in ELF academic group discussion tasks, where the tendency towards greater cooperation and mutual support in ELF communication may be at odds with the need to achieve task goals through the expression of an oppositional stance. In addressing this issue, the current study sought to answer the research question: how do postgraduate students in a UK university setting express their disagreement in ELF academic group discussion? Twelve participants from ten different linguacultural backgrounds completed two different simulated discussion tasks: one targeting opinions, and the other consensus decision-making. The same participants also took part in retrospective stimulated-recall interviews using the video-recording of their discussions as a stimulus. Discourse analysis of the transcribed interactions revealed that the ELF participants used a wide range of verbal, nonverbal and interactional strategies in their disagreeing practices. Three salient strategies are presented in detail: focus shifts, complex turn-management (other-initiated disagreement turn dependence and turn-throwing/passing), and the use of gaze. Through these examples, we show that while the discourse produced in group discussion tasks was rich in disagreement, ELF participants used complex linguistic and interactional strategies to avoid explicit displays of their oppositional stance. Results are discussed with a view to developing theory around disagreement in ELF academic contexts.

Disagreement Strategies used by Speakers of English as a Lingua Franca in Business Meetings

“…15-17). Similarly, Toomaneejinda and Harding (2018) found that academic group discussions among graduate students were rich in disagreement acts which were carefully expressed in a non-oppositional manner.…”

“…The majority of studies on ELF disagreement acts were conducted in an academic setting (e.g., Bjørge, 2012;Komori-Glatz, 2018;Matsumoto, 2018;Toomaneejinda & Harding, 2018). One main study is by Bjørge (2012), who followed a comparative approach by comparing the linguistic forms for disagreeing found in business English textbooks and the ones used by international students in simulated negotiations.…”

“…The first is using mitigating linguistic items such as 'but' and 'actually', serving to convey the speaker's divergent perspective and orienting the listener to that perspective. The second technique used to mitigate the disagreement is "focus shift" which occurs when a speaker raises an alternative claim to oppose an earlier proposition, introducing new dimensions to the topic discussed (e.g., Georgakopoulou, 2001;Osvaldsson, 2004;Toomaneejinda & Harding, 2018). Here, we can see that speaker 1 shifted the focus in line 7 and 9 from speaker's 4 observation that the company buys and sells "sweets" to the fact that it handles "different products," including but not limited to sweets.…”

“…The most used mitigation strategy in the analyzed sub-corpus is indirectness, constituting 67% of all identified mitigated disagreement acts. In the literature, this strategy is sometimes called focus shifting which occurs when a speaker takes a neutral stance by not rejecting the controversial statement and attempts instead to change the focus in his response to a different point that was not addressed in that statement (e.g., Georgakopoulou, 2001;Osvaldsson, 2004;Toomaneejinda & Harding, 2018). Thus, rather than explicitly negating the statement, the speaker would introduce a new topic in his reply to express his disagreement.…”

“…While much of the early research on ELF interaction mostly focused on such cooperative aspects, more recently, other questions have been raised concerning ELF users' disagreement practices. In particular, ways of expressing conflicting opinions in ELF interactions have been investigated in academic settings (Bjørge, 2012;Komori-Glatz, 2018;Matsumoto, 2018;Toomaneejinda & Harding, 2018), informal settings (Jenks, 2012;Konakahara, 2015Konakahara, , 2017, with little attention to professional business contexts (Marra, 2016). Consequently, little is known about how ELF users display disagreement in real-life business contexts.…”